GMCTL | Online Teaching & Edtech ideas (archived)
Instructional design ideas, online teaching tools, and best practices for learning from the USask Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning
How do you determine the weight of an assessment? Do you think about student effort, or high-priority learning outcomes, or perhaps which assessments are most reliable? What seems “right” for assessment weights will vary depending on who you ask, including students. Why not let them decide? Flexible assessment weighting gives students greater control over their learning, and it can lead to a better overall course experience. If the concept sounds too novel, there are also ways to “personalize” flexible weighting to fit your comfort level.
Continue reading “Flexible Assessment Weighting: Offering Students Choice”
Most online courses feature a Discussions element, and it is very common for this activity to be worth at least a portion of the student’s course grade. However, it can be challenging to assign a grade to student work in Discussions — and this is particularly true if you have Discussions frequently in your class (like a weekly thread), if you have a large class, or if you just have a particularly lively or busy Discussion board with many replies.
As an alternative to carefully reviewing and grading each Discussion post your students make, why not try Self-Assessment for online course Discussions? Self-Assessment is a great way to support student autonomy, build metacognition, and move away from rote responses on Discussion boards. Rather, you are aiming to have students think critically about why and how they are participating in the Discussions, and reflect upon how Discussion activities can enhance learning for them and their classmates.
This post will outline how to set this up in Canvas, offers a sample rubric, and presents a few things to consider when trying this approach.
Continue reading “Using Student Self-Assessment to Grade Discussions”
Much of the work we produce in online classes takes the form of discussions, and assignments. Most of this is done online, using a computer (either desktop or laptop), and using applications such as Word, PowerPoint, SPSS, and more. However, there are times were we might have work to complete “off-screen” such as illustrations, graphs, charts, calculations, musical notation, etc. In these cases you might have a document or paper you’ve written on, and need to submit that work. There are a few ways you can use your mobile device to scan and submit these documents. Continue reading “Don’t have a Scanner? Submitting Assignments with a Mobile Device”